Gravity Forms Nearest Location Premium Add-on Setup Guide

Video walkthrough

2:14

Gravity Forms Nearest Location: Closest Store + Distance from Any Address
Watch: find the nearest café to any address, show the distance and send the request to that location. Watch on YouTube

The Gravity Forms Nearest Location Premium Add-on adds a Nearest Location field to Gravity Forms. The visitor can share their position with one click (the browser asks them first), or the add-on looks up the address they type in the form’s Address field. The position is compared with your list of locations, and the nearest location and its distance are shown on the form, saved with the entry, usable in conditional logic and available as merge tags, so a notification can go straight to the right branch.

This guide covers installation, the geocoding service, your locations, the field, conditional logic and notifications, the entry map and troubleshooting.

Step 1: Install and Activate Your License

1. In WordPress go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, upload the add-on ZIP file and click Activate.
2. Go to Forms → Settings → Nearest Location, enter your key in the Gravity Extra License section and click Activate License.
3. The page then shows the Address lookup (geocoding) and Distance, privacy and map sections, and the Forms → Nearest Location menu appears.

Step 2: Choose the Geocoding Service

Geocoding turns an address into latitude and longitude (and a shared position into a street address). Results are cached on your site for 30 days, so the same address is never looked up twice in that time.

• OpenStreetMap Nominatim – free and without a key. The public server allows at most one lookup per second; the add-on waits its turn for the whole site and identifies your site in every request, as the Nominatim usage policy asks. Enter a Contact e-mail for Nominatim so OpenStreetMap can reach you instead of blocking your site. For many lookups a day, enter your own or a commercial Nominatim server under Own Nominatim server.
• Google Geocoding API – uses your own Google Cloud key with the Geocoding API enabled. The key is used only by your server and is never sent to your forms or visitors. Google bills the lookups to your account.
• Off – only positions shared by the browser are used; Address fields are not looked up.
• Look up the street address of shared locations – saves a readable address for positions shared by the browser.

Under Distance, privacy and map, choose kilometres or miles, the Saved coordinate precision (exact, or rounded to about 10 m, 100 m or 1 km for privacy – the nearest location is always found with the exact position) and, if you like, another map tile server and its attribution.

Step 3: Add Your Locations

Open Forms → Nearest Location. The page shows your locations on a map, a form to add one and the list.

• Name and Address – leave latitude and longitude empty and the add-on looks them up from the address. If an address cannot be found, enter the coordinates yourself (right-click the place in OpenStreetMap and choose “Show address” to copy them).
• E-mail and Phone – used by the merge tags, for example to send each request to its branch. They are never shown on the form.
• Group – optional, for example “Clinics” or “Depots”. A form can compare only the locations of one group. A location can be in several groups separated by commas.
• Active – untick it to keep a location in the list without using it.
• Add many locations – paste one location per line: Name; Address; Latitude; Longitude; E-mail; Phone; Group. Tabs or | also work. Up to 50 addresses are looked up per run.

Step 4: Add the Nearest Location Field

Open the form in the editor and add Nearest Location from Advanced Fields, usually below the Address field. Its settings:

• Address field to look up – the Address field whose address is geocoded when the visitor does not share a location. The first Address field of the form is chosen for you.
• Show a “Use my current location” button – nothing is asked before the visitor clicks it; then the browser asks for permission. You can change the Button text and the Privacy note under the button.
• Show the nearest location and distance on the form – a card with the name, distance and address of the nearest location. Without it, the values are still saved.
• Locations to compare – all locations or one group.
• Service radius – optional. Farther away, the visitor sees the Message outside the radius; tick Do not accept requests outside the radius to refuse the request.
• Required – the visitor must share a location or enter an address that can be found.

While the visitor types the address, it is looked up when they leave the field, and the nearest location appears. When the form is sent, the add-on looks the position up again on your server and recalculates the nearest location and the distance, so values changed in the browser are ignored.

Step 5: Conditional Logic and Notifications

The field has four inputs that conditional logic can use: Nearest location, Distance, Latitude and Longitude. For example, show a parking note when “Nearest location” is “Evanston Clinic”, or ask about a home visit when “Distance” is greater than 15. For the location name the rule offers your location names in a drop-down.

Notification conditions can also use the entry meta Nearest location, Distance to nearest location, Location source, latitude and longitude. To send a request to its branch, put {nearest_location_email} in the notification’s Send To Email.

The field merge tag (for example {Your nearest clinic:5}) gives “Lincoln Park Clinic (1.2 km)”; :5.1 to :5.4 give one input.

Step 6: The Entry Map

• Each entry with a position gets a Location box: an OpenStreetMap map with the entry position and the nearest location joined by a line, the nearest location with its distance and address, the saved address, the coordinates, the source and, for shared positions, the accuracy.
• Open in OpenStreetMap and Directions open the position and a route on openstreetmap.org.
• Nearest location, distance, address, source, latitude and longitude can be added as columns in the entry list and used in entry filters.
• The map uses Leaflet, which is included in the add-on, and OpenStreetMap tiles. No API key is needed.

Troubleshooting & FAQ